Praising President Vladimir V. Putin as a “humanitarian,” the Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday thanked the Russian leader in St. Petersburg for releasing an American held for years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.
The release came after President Trump made a direct appeal to Mr. Putin to let the 74-year-old teacher, Stephen James Hubbard, return to the United States. Russia had accused Mr. Hubbard, who was held for over four years, of being a Ukrainian mercenary.
“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Mr. Witkoff told Mr. Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.”
Mr. Putin, who started a war of aggression against Ukraine that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, is wanted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court. Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly expressed sympathies for strongmen and parroted Kremlin talking points, has long made clear his disdain for the I.C.C.
His envoy’s embrace of Mr. Putin on Wednesday capped a tumultuous 12 days in which Mr. Trump has repeatedly sided with Russia and sidelined Ukraine.
The American president has announced that the United States will buy Russian diesel fuel and suspend the imposition of new sanctions. Mr. Trump also called on Ukraine to replace President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Putin’s nemesis.
Ukraine said the United States had intermittently cut off intelligence sharing; limited its access to Starshield, the military version of the satellite internet service Starlink; and suspended delivery of its already limited supply of Patriot interceptors, the only defense Ukraine has against Russian ballistic missiles.
Mr. Witkoff, over repeated visits to Moscow, has raised eyebrows in Kyiv for his what critics call his at times fawning behavior toward Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump himself faced similar criticism for welcoming Mr. Putin to Alaska with a red carpet in the summer of 2025, ending years of diplomatic isolation for the Russian leader over the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Trump administration says it is trying to build a relationship with the Russian leader as it pursues negotiations to end the war.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that he had asked Mr. Putin last week to release Mr. Hubbard, who was “on his way back home and will soon be with his family.”
“The United States, out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return — an unprecedented situation for Russia,” the American president wrote on Truth Social. “There was no ‘swap’ necessary for this release.”
Turning over Mr. Hubbard, who was tortured, sometimes starved and placed in the general prison population in a country where he did not speak the language, came at little cost to Mr. Putin. But the move buys him good will with Mr. Trump, who is arguing that he alone has the relationship with Mr. Putin needed to get him to end the war.
Mr. Witkoff’s remarks came at the start of talks in St. Petersburg, where the U.S. envoy had come to discuss new variants of a proposed plan to end the war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He told Mr. Putin he had “brought some papers” with “some ideas about the different elements of some sort of peace deal,” saying that the Russian leader could “read that at your leisure later.”
Mr. Trump had telegraphed that he had sought Mr. Hubbard’s release, talking to reporters about it on Tuesday, when the former teacher was still in captivity. But Mr. Trump didn’t mention that Mr. Hubbard was being held because Mr. Putin’s government had sought to take American prisoners for leverage.
As Mr. Putin and Mr. Witkoff were meeting, though, Russia’s security services announced the arrest of a German citizen on charges similar to Mr. Hubbard’s.
In recent days, as Mr. Hubbard was moved out of a penal colony and prepared for release, it became clear that his value to Mr. Putin had changed. He was now more valuable to the Russian leader as a symbol of the renewed relationship with the U.S. president than as a pawn in negotiations.
Mr. Hubbard’s health is fragile. The Trump administration has pushed for his release since learning of his case, making it a priority, lawyers for Mr. Hubbard said. He will be flown to a State Department facility in Texas for evaluation and treatment.
Mr. Hubbard was essentially abducted by Russian soldiers from eastern Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded and accused of fighting for Ukraine. Russian sentencing documents said he was given the call signs, or nicknames, of “Samurai” and “Ninja,” and that he manned a checkpoint on a bridge over a river.
This was highly unlikely.
Mr. Hubbard, a Michigan native, was living in the city of Izium, near Kharkiv, after a peripatetic life, teaching English for years in Japan and moving for a time to Cyprus, where one of his sons lived, before settling down with a Ukrainian woman. After that relationship ended, Mr. Hubbard opted to stay in Ukraine.
He had just turned 70 when the Russians invaded. His son in Japan told him to keep his head down, but Mr. Hubbard did not seem to understand that the war had started, text messages between the two men showed. Those messages also showed no evidence that Mr. Hubbard had joined the Ukrainian military. He told his son that all was well. He gave daily updates, like when he went to church. He had a hard time buying food, but said once that he bought caviar “for nutrition.”
The Russians said they arrested him inside the home of an acquaintance in April 2022.
Ukrainian prisoners of war who were held with Mr. Hubbard later told The New York Times that he had been repeatedly tortured because he was an American — beaten, forced to stand all day, given little food and poor medical care. In interviews after they were released, the Ukrainians said they feared for Mr. Hubbard’s life.
In October 2024, a Russian court convicted Mr. Hubbard of being a mercenary and sentenced him to almost seven years in a penal colony.
Unlike other Americans held in the Russian prison system, Mr. Hubbard was kept in the general population, his lawyers said. At times, his family had no idea where he was and the U.S. embassy had no access to him.
Mr. Hubbard was designated by the State Department as wrongfully detained in January 2025.
Shortly afterward, Martin De Luca, a former federal prosecutor instrumental in winning the release in February 2025 of another American held by Russia, started working on Mr. Hubbard’s case.
EPAM Law, a Moscow law firm that worked with Mr. De Luca on that earlier release, found out that Mr. Hubbard was being held in the IK-12 penal colony in Mordovia, the southwestern Russian region commonly referred to as “prison land.” In May 2025, Mr. Hubbard was allowed to call his son in Cyprus, Joseph Coleman.
In an interview, Mr. Coleman said that he had spoken for about a minute then with his father, who initially sounded as though he was in good spirits.
“But then somewhere in the middle it turned and you could you could hear the frustration in his voice,” Mr. Coleman recalled. “You could hear maybe a slight lack of hope.”
Mr. Coleman, who is a Greek Orthodox priest, wrote a long letter to Mr. Putin in September, making a point of his Orthodox faith, similar to Russian Orthodox, and pleading for his father’s release.
On Tuesday night, Mr. Coleman said that he was looking forward to seeing his father and that he would do whatever he could to help him upon his release.
“I don’t want to be stressful to him,” Mr. Coleman said. “I want to be in his presence and make sure he’s healthy and he’s well and, you know, if he wants to talk, we’ll talk.”
Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting.
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